Representing, querying and transforming social networks with RDF/SPARQL

Abstract

As social networks are becoming ubiquitous on the Web, the Semantic Web goals indicate that it is critical to have a standard model allowing exchange, interoperability, transformation, and querying of social network data. In this paper we show that RDF/SPARQL meet this desiderata. Building on developments of social network analysis, graph databases and Semantic Web, we present a social networks data model based on RDF, and a query and transformation language based on SPARQL meeting the above requirements. We study its expressive power and complexity showing that it behaves well, and present an illustrative prototype. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.